Obama's Health Care Plan A Sensible Option

A very interesting analysis of the President Obama’s health care plan by Ms. Klingman (http://maryklingman.blogspot.com/2010/11/obamacare-will-it-hurt-us-more-than-it.html) . However, in several places it appears that Ms. Klingman’s analysis is based on faulty information, or she has bough into the disinformation campaign peddled by the insurance companies and their Republican allies.  As the Nobel-prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman explained recently, there is such depth of ignorance about existing healthcare arrangements in America that many people have no idea about the extent to which the government is already involved.

To start with Obama never characterized his health care plan as “universal” as stated by Ms. Klingman. While the plan’s supporters and backers did campaign vigorously for a “public option” this part of the plan was dropped, when there was very little Congressional support for it. In addition, the author mentions that, “Obama is allowing people to either choose a private insurance company or to choose the national health care plan.”  There is no national health care plan, all the states will have administer their plans through insurance exchanges.

Ms. Klingman’s concerns about funding and taxes are valid to some extent.  However, even without the health care reform, medical inflation has been increasing at double digit rates for the past several years. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new law would reduce the federal deficit by $143 billion over the first decade and in the decade after that by an amount equivalent in a broad range between one quarter percent and one-half percent of GDP.  There are still about 46 million Americans without health insurance; and ever since 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt came up with the first national health insurance plan, presidents have been putting forward ideas for plugging this gap and achieving universal cover. In 1970, President Nixon a Republican proposed a health care reform in package, which was later shelved due to its assumed high cost of $40 billion.  Four decades later, we now have a much needed, reasonable and relatively affordable health care plan. The American people should take the time to read and understand the plan and not be taken in by Republican demagoguery and disinformation.